Competency Manifestation Clues within Interactions in Computer Mediated Communication

Abstract

The notion of competence is multidimensional and polysemic. Several definitions of this notion are present in the literature according to disciplines such as industry, sociology, management, psychology, etc. It often refers to the experience, knowledge, abilities, skills, behaviors, and attitudes that allow valuable action in a workplace. Beyond its intrinsic value for the individual, competence is considered in organizations as an intangible asset whose mere possession often provides very considerable competitive advantages. The manifestation of competence takes several forms and the methods of its evaluation differ, ranging from quantitative approaches to social recognition. The approach that we have developed is based on the hypothesis that interacting individuals emphasize the components of their functional competencies according to the activity they carry out and the context that surrounds it. We chose pragma-linguistic, which permits us a more in-depth analysis in comparison to statistical analysis based on text-mining or data-mining techniques that are insufficient for an accurate detection of competence. For that purpose, we have proposed an interaction analysis methodology based on natural language processing techniques to find language elements that highlight the clues of the manifestation of the competence in computer mediated communications. We have developed and implemented two algorithms for the detection and analysis of competence that we have applied to interactions from the "Ubuntu" corpus of the community of interest of the same name which deal with Ubuntu operating system issues. The results of the application of our approach are presented and discussed in this paper.